Arts Lab

‘Being creative is part of the human condition’ says Theroux

An interviewer is at the BBC finding out how people are getting creative for the start of the BBC Get Creative Week. Here are some of Louis Theroux’s thoughts on creativity:

‘In terms of getting creative, I suppose I like to try and challenge myself and put myself in situations – either morally or otherwise – where there’s a feeling that you don’t quite know what you think about something. Somehow break your habits. But it’s not always easy. They used to say that you have to wait for the muse to strike. … And although that’s probably pushing it a bit too far, there is a sense in which there’s a mysterious quality to being creative. It’s a tension between having a format or a form and then doing something different so that it’s not formulaic.

I think being creative is part of the human condition.If you stifle creativity, you’re really only leading half a life, and I think there’s nothing else that quite compares with it.

We need food, we need air, we need companionship, but we also need the chance to express ourselves and sometimes that takes a little bit of encouragement and it’s easy to forget because it’s not obviously a vital need. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a vital need.’